Acolyte (27 page)

Jonah shook his head. ‘I don't know what they are. I think I saw them in a vision I had, Andreas laying waste to a city as the smaller shadows flowed on the ground at his feet. I could only guess, though.'

‘And what was your guess?' said Kendrick.

‘That they're pieces of what's inside Andreas,' said Jonah. ‘His disciples. His acolytes.'

Kendrick looked at Tess. She nodded. ‘You're right. They're fragments of the whole. A host accepts them willingly. It gives them strength, but I think it acts like a drug. Gradually the host cedes control until they're just extensions. Puppets.'

Jonah quailed. ‘If they're parts of it, does that mean when Torrance or Heggarty saw me, Andreas saw me too?'

‘No,' said Kendrick. ‘Andreas uses normal channels to communicate with his people. If they shared some kind of direct link, they'd not need to risk anyone eavesdropping. I've known about these creatures for a while. I was already aware that the shadows can be seen when they separate, but until you, I didn't realize we could tell who was infected by sight alone.'

‘I can't be the only one who sees them,' said Jonah.

Tess nodded. ‘So far, it's just you.'

‘The FBI agent who brought me in had one,' said Jonah. ‘Him, and his partner. He claimed that Andreas wanted to rule, not destroy.'

‘And what do you think?' said Kendrick.

Jonah shook his head. ‘The only thing it wants to rule over is ash.'

Kendrick nodded, and a sombre silence fell. ‘Enough,' he said, waving it away. ‘We all need sleep. Tess, you go on ahead. I'd like to make sure our guests know the house rules.'

‘OK,' she said. ‘Jonah, Never. I'll see you in the morning.' She smiled, or tried to.

Once she'd gone, Kendrick sipped his whiskey and frowned. ‘There's something ancient and brave inside her,' he said. ‘Ancient, brave and lost. And it might be our only hope.'

‘But the Elder she's host to, it's part of her now,' said Jonah. ‘Isn't it? That was the whole point of Unity.'

Kendrick shook his head. ‘That was the goal, yes, but it didn't seem to work out. She was broken when I tracked her down. Traumatized. Before it all went wrong, Andreas and the others had hoped their Unity with these creatures would be effortless, a perfect union of minds. At the time of the fire, Tess was the only one among them who had been showing any progress. Dreams, visions. Overwhelming but manageable. When she was on the run it turned out to be one long series of nightmares. She was close to madness when I found her, Jonah. The only thing that saved her was the
medication you revivers take, to counter post-traumatic stress disorder.'

‘BPV,' said Jonah.

‘Yes. Large doses of it stopped the nightmares, but it also silenced the Elder. Andreas is desperate to find her. He must be scared she knows too much, and if he's scared, there has to be some vulnerability, some way to defeat him that the Elder knows. But she'd have to come off the medication and face the nightmares again. The prospect terrifies her. Almost as much as the prospect of Andreas finding her.'

‘But you got her first,' said Jonah.

‘Before I realized he was playing me, he told us she was crucial to revealing all the secrets he promised us. None of our people could track her down. When I saw the light and got out of there, I found Tess by myself within three weeks. I beat him to the punch. That's what happens when you fuck over the best.' He raised his glass and nodded.
The man's taking a bow
, thought Jonah.

Kendrick offered his bourbon. Jonah and Never both declined and took another beer instead, Never wincing as he reached across for it. ‘Between being crashed into and being tortured, I think my body broke today,' he said.

Kendrick reached into his pocket and produced a blister pack of pills, sliding them towards Never. ‘If you're hurting, take two tablets. You'll sleep better. You can have another two in the morning, if you need it.'

‘Oxycodone,' read Never. He looked at the pills with undisguised suspicion, then looked at Kendrick the same way.

‘A little trust would be welcome,' said Kendrick.

‘Fuck it,' said Never, and took out two, washing them down with beer.

Jonah did the same. He was too tired to try second-guessing Kendrick's real intentions.

‘You'll feel worse tomorrow,' said Kendrick, ‘but you're both young enough to shrug it off in a few days.'

‘Listen to Old Gramps,' said Never, getting a tolerant smile from Kendrick.

Jonah looked at the man, and wondered what age he was. Anywhere between forty and sixty. ‘How old
are
you, anyway?'

Kendrick shrugged. ‘Lives like mine are measured in dog years.'

For a minute or so they drank in silence, but there was something Jonah wanted to broach. ‘Kendrick?' said Jonah. ‘Uh, Larry?'

Kendrick raised an eyebrow. ‘“Kendrick” is fine.'

‘I want to get a message to Annabel. Annabel Harker. I was talking to her when we were attacked. She must have gone on the run by now, but I want to let her know we're OK. We'd agreed on ways to get in touch if something happened. Safe ways.'

Kendrick frowned. ‘Safe ways, hmm? I'll consider it. Your disappearance has hit the headlines, by the way. The story they put out has you – a
top reviver
, no less – kidnapped by extremists, and in the current climate it's a firecracker. They released phoney descriptions of two of the attackers. One looked very like Tess, apparently. The other could have been my twin.' He raised a sarcastic eyebrow. ‘What are the odds?'

There was another concern Jonah had, one he wasn't eager to raise. ‘The medication Tess is using,' he said. ‘It's dangerous at high doses. You must know that. She looks sick.'

‘I know,' said Kendrick. ‘But the medication alone doesn't explain how quickly she's been getting worse. She thinks she'll lose her mind if she stops taking it, but I think the lack of contact with the being inside her is the main problem.' Kendrick drained his glass. ‘I think it's killing her.'

Jonah woke in pain the next morning. His hand went to his cheek for an instant, to the spot where Hopkins had daubed his favourite drug, but it was the complaints from the rest of his body that were the source of it: every muscle in his back, every sinew in his neck.

The pain spread to his mind, then, as the pieces came back. The impact. Bob Crenner's death. The screams of Never across the intercom as the drug was put in both eyes …

He got up with care. He'd kept the blister pack of pills Never had handed him, and now he took two right off as he pulled on his clothes. He'd slept solidly – Kendrick was right about that at least. He lay down on the bed again, waiting for the medication to grant its respite. Only then did he take time to glance around the room he'd slept in. The night before, he'd not paid the room any attention, oblivion sneaking up on him before he knew it. The room was bare bones just like the rest of the house, with another of the odd lamps on the ceiling by the door. ‘Sunlamps,' Kendrick had explained when they'd asked. ‘Tess insisted. To ward off the shadows. Whether they're worth a damn or not, well, let's hope we don't have to find out.'

As the pills kicked in, Jonah heard snoring from the room next to his. He got up and entered, to see Never fast asleep and looking peaceful. He left the pills by Never's bed and went downstairs.

Tess was sitting at the table, blank-faced and staring ahead.

He said nothing, thinking of sleepwalkers, of the notion that
waking them was a terrible thing to do. Her expression scared him, the sheer weariness it carried. He crossed to the kettle and switched it on, hunting for the makings of coffee, being noisier than was really necessary.

In gradual steps her awareness surfaced from somewhere deep inside. ‘Jonah,' she said, his presence a surprise to her.

‘You want coffee?' He hoped his question sounded casual enough to hide the anxiety he felt for her.

‘No …' she said, still vague. Then she looked around herself, and shook her head. ‘Jesus. This must look terrible, but please don't worry. I'm just a little
dazed
now and again. It's the medication I'm taking.'

‘Kendrick told me.'

She nodded. ‘Did he explain why?'

‘He did. You can't keep doing it. Not indefinitely.'

She changed the subject. ‘Larry's gone out for supplies,' she said.

‘Kendrick thinks there must be a way to stop Andreas. He thinks you're the only hope for finding out how. All this time, I hadn't doubted for a second that Andreas died that night. I saw what it was inside him. I saw it destroy other civilizations, and I knew that if Andreas was alive, then it would already have happened here, too. So why hasn't it?'

‘The power it had was vast, Jonah,' said Tess. ‘This is a creature that gains its strength from the souls it consumes, and it had eaten the souls of a thousand worlds. It escaped its prison with only a fraction of its power. The rest would have taken weeks to come through the conduit that had been forged. Then it almost died, and the conduit collapsed. The flow virtually stopped. If it hadn't, the world would have been lost to the Shadow long ago. The Beast would have won. The evil that's in Andreas is nothing compared to what it would be if it could find that power again, and unlock it. Andreas believes he's close to knowing how to do that.'

‘Is that what Winnerden Flats is for?' said Jonah. ‘Finding out how to open the door?'

‘The lead researcher at Baseline is someone you know, right?'

‘Stephanie Graves, yes.'

‘She's not one of Andreas's people,' said Tess. ‘Neither are the researchers she's gathered, as far as we can tell.'

‘I thought it might be some kind of misdirection. To keep the strongest revivers out of the way, and reduce the chance of them stumbling into something the way I did.'

‘That's probably an important part of it. But half of the facility is hush-hush, supposedly where the cryogenics research continues. As far as we know it's really where the work to open that doorway is going on. Baseline's acting as a smokescreen to let them funnel money into the project.'

He reached out and took her hands in his. They felt cold. ‘Do you think we can stop Andreas?'

‘I don't think he's invulnerable, but beyond that I don't know. I'm scared to learn anything new now. Knowledge could be dangerous. I could learn exactly what would allow Andreas to rise. That's the word he uses for regaining his power: his
rise.
And then – well, you know what happens then.'

Jonah nodded his head, the sound and sight of the Great Shadow filling his mind: the Beast strident, destruction at the tips of its claws. He remembered feeling the certainty within the creature's mind, the utter lack of doubt, lack of
weakness.
He thought of Andreas, on fire and smiling, the ceiling crashing down. Somehow he'd got out of the building. Somehow he'd made his recovery, with no visible sign of injury.

Rise.
‘Yes,' he said.

*

When his coffee was finished, Jonah left Tess in the kitchen and took the opportunity to look around the safe house, using the time to get familiar with the layout. Every room had the same level of
faded décor, the same sparse furnishings, the same cabling and sunlamp fittings along the ceiling. The entire building was devoid of identity, almost as if the house itself was in hiding.

Upstairs, he checked in again on the still-sleeping Never, the snoring even louder than before. Thoughts of what they'd experienced the previous day loomed in his mind; he shoved them away, hard. He closed his eyes as tears started flowing. He left Never's room and wiped them away, angry and confused. He leaned against the wall in the corridor, breathing slowly, the tears not stopping.

He punched the wall and swore at himself, a whispered hiss of frustration.

‘Don't,' said Kendrick's voice from beside him. Jonah snapped open his eyes, stunned that the man could have got so close without making a sound.

‘Don't what?' he said.

‘Fall apart. We don't have time.' Kendrick nodded towards Never's room. ‘And your friend needs you to be as normal as possible.'

‘He's coping better than I am,' said Jonah. ‘I don't know how, but he is. Listen to him.'

‘At five a.m. he woke up screaming. You didn't stir. What your friend went through will take a while to work itself out, if it ever does. It's a kind of mental shrapnel. What they gave him was far stronger than the solution they gave you, and in the eyes … a terrible, consuming pain, but one that cuts off suddenly with no lasting physical effects. Like you imagined it all, like it meant nothing, but the memory is so
strong.
The incongruity is difficult to process.' Kendrick's eyes went to the floor. ‘It won't be easy for him.'

Jonah made the connection. ‘You went through the same thing.'

Kendrick nodded. ‘With the same man who tormented you; Never was right about that. It was after I'd realized the truth about
Andreas, while I was still faking my loyalty. But I'd been careless about a small matter. They doubted me. I convinced them.' He fell silent for a moment. Jonah thought about the pain he himself had gone through. He couldn't imagine the strength it would take to be able to keep up a deception under that kind of torment, let alone under what Never had experienced. He looked at Kendrick with a new level of respect – and a new level of wariness.

‘I'd regained their trust,' Kendrick said, ‘but only enough for them to let me live. That was when I knew the moment had come for me to vanish. Now, though, it's time your friend was awake. Once we've had breakfast, I'll explain the job I have for you.'

*

Jonah shook Never from his sleep. They took turns to shower, the water tepid and insubstantial but a godsend, nonetheless. Part of Kendrick's supply run had included toothbrushes; Jonah marvelled at the way a clean mouth made him feel better armed against whatever was coming. He voiced this to Never.